Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Monday 9th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to speak to Amendments 69B, 70, 71 and 72 in this group. It is terrific that kinship care will be defined in legislation for the first time. It is a significant step, and one that we should admit is long overdue. I could never understand why kinship care was always so overlooked when it is very often the best solution to a child’s care. When I say, “best solution”, I mean that very much in the sense of the interests of the child, for one other thing that is overlooked—and underestimated—is the huge sacrifice that family members and friends make when they take on such a responsibility. While many do so willingly, the system does not exactly make it easy for them. That is why Amendment 69B, in the names of my noble friends Lord Effingham and Lady Stedman-Scott, is a sensible one in that it acknowledges the role of the whole family. I also hope that the Government will consider Amendment 70 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton.

Another significant step in this Bill is the duty for local authorities to publish a kinship local offer. However, there is an error of omission in that there is no reference anywhere to the different forms of kinship care. We know that different frameworks have different levels of financial, health and therapeutic support, depending on whether you are kinship fostering or have taken on responsibility via a special guardianship order, and whether the child you are taking on has or has not been in care previously. The only problem is that, very often, the potential kinship carers—for the reasons explained by my noble friend—do not have a clue about any of this. Why would they?

I will give some examples of what this means in practice, and this is courtesy of the very good charity, Kinship. Fiona’s grandson was taken into foster care at birth, and she was told that, unless she applied for a special guardianship order to look after him, he would stay in the care system. She said she felt pressured and pushed into this, because she did not have a clue what her options were. As she says, “I took social services at their word that this was the best for me and my grandson”. That was six years ago, and she was then 59 years old. She had to give up a well-paid career, and now survives on benefits and relies on food banks, eating only child-sized meals herself to get by. She has also struggled to get her grandson the assessments and support he needs, which would have been much easier had she been a foster carer.

Similarly, Sue, a former social worker, now 60, took care of her three granddaughters and one grandson. She was told by the local authority that she had to sort out all the court work and pay for all the solicitors’ fees to arrange the care of the children and get a special guardianship order. She and her husband were on benefits, but as guardians, they were means-tested and they received £17 per week per child. Sue, now a widow, had to complain to her local councillor, the Children’s Commissioner and the ombudsman before receiving an uplift.

Finally, Rebekah, 63, is raising her two grandchildren on benefits after the death of their mother, but what she did not realise was that she would not get any support from the local authority because the children had not been in care. She is now struggling and in debt. As she says, “Fortunately I’m resilient and resourceful, but it’s been a huge challenge. We’ve been flying by the seat of our pants, with no support or guidance or anything”.

The upcoming pilot on a financial allowance will, I hope, address some of these inequities, but it seems essential that potential carers are given explicit information on any legal support available. I think we can all see from the examples given that it would have probably helped the three women I have just mentioned.

I really hope that the Government will consider Amendment 70, which is a small change but could have a big impact. Can the Minister give us any further details on the pilot, which is an incredibly good thing but obviously comes too late for this Bill?

I hope the Government will also consider Amendment 72 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, which also covers the issue raised in Amendment 71 from my noble friend Lord Effingham. As the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, has said, it would simply put the kinship care offer on a par with other offers, such as for SEN and disability. I am interested in the requirement in both amendments to guarantee the involvement of children and carers in the development of kinship care offers.

Working with the Grenfell community, the victims of child sexual abuse and infected blood over the years, it has become clear that local and national government is just not always very good at meaningful engagement. I once asked a civil servant what engagement they had had with regard to a specific policy, and I was explicitly told that there had purposely been no direct communication because it was incredibly important to keep a distance between those developing the policy and those who would be affected by it.

Things have improved since then but probably not as much as they should have done, and so I genuinely believe that embedding engagement into legislation, where appropriate, is the only way that we will drive the necessary culture change. We should not forget that a really important benefit of that engagement is that it builds empathy into the system. Too often, empathy is an afterthought—such as when certain television dramas might evoke a public outcry—when really it should be there as a given.

So, while explicitly involving children and families in the development of kinship care offers may seem a small matter, I really do believe it would have a far-reaching effect in helping to make the state work better for the people who need it.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 69B to 72, and I declare my interests as a governor of Coram and as a trustee of the Foundling Museum, both of which organisations do a huge amount of work with children involved in these amendments.

We do not realise how lucky we are with kinship care. The figures speak for themselves. When you compare the fact that we have 153,000 children being kept in kinship care with the numbers officially in the care system, which is approaching dangerously near 100,000, and the relatively small number of children who are fortunate enough to be adopted, we are incredibly lucky to have kinship care.

A lot of the history of kinship care as it has evolved and grown has been really about taking it for granted and assuming that is what families or extended families do—and, to a large extent, being inordinately grateful that they are there to take these children on and feeling that one probably needs to devote slightly less time and attention to helping those kinship carers do the best they possibly can by comparison with, let us say, children who are conventionally going through the care system. That is clearly a major imbalance.

A particular sentence jumped out at me from the briefing that the organisation Kinship provided in preparation for this stage:

“Given the long and troubling history of poor compliance with kinship statutory guidance, it is imperative that government does not simply take the approach that these matters can be attended to in guidance alone”—


tempting as that is.

With 153,000 currently in kinship care, we have in theory an enormous amount of data to identify where it is being done well and where it is being done less well. So I did a bit of interrogation of the artificial intelligence tool that we are provided with here, courtesy of Microsoft, and an example that jumps out several times when I interrogated it, as a local authority or city council that has best practice in this area, is the city of Portsmouth. I have no idea whether people knew that, or to what extent the department or the Bill team have looked in detail at what it is that Portsmouth is doing that is clearly shooting the lights out compared with a lot of other cities or local authorities. But it is possible to identify what is being done well now, to learn from that and to try to see the best way to put that either into legislation or into guidance so that we are not effectively reinventing the wheel. This is happening at such a large scale that there must be incredibly rich qualitative and quantitative data that we can learn from. I just hope that during the course of the Bill we can drill down, look at that in more detail, try to identify some of those elements of best practice and perhaps bring that back to the discussion on Report.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I will start using the mantra of the Minister: on a number of occasions she has said that it is about getting children and families the right support. I very much agree with that.

I will start by talking generally about the care system. I met a young man whose name is Tristan, and when he was a child he was put into care. When I was chatting to him I was genuinely shocked when he told me he had been in nine different care settings throughout the country. Imagine this child going from one care setting to another. I do not know the reasons why, but that happened. He was lucky enough to end the care placements by being fostered by parents in Liverpool, who eventually adopted him as their son. That was the happy outcome after all the trauma that went on before. He is now at Liverpool John Moores University, studying law.

--- Later in debate ---

For the reasons I outlined, I kindly ask the noble Earl to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I welcome an awful lot of what the Minister said and what His Majesty’s Government are trying to do. My heart sank slightly when I heard the piece about relying on statutory guidance, which was obviously written for her beforehand. I have worked very closely on a variety of Bills over the past four or five years with the Children’s Commissioner, the Victims’ Commissioner and the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. If the Minister were to sit down with each or all of them and ask them about the experience they had of overreliance on statutory guidance, she would get some very mixed messages.

Statutory guidance is effective only if the degree to which it is complied with is monitored; it is of no use whatever if the organisations that are meant to carry it out know that nobody is looking over their shoulder or calling them to book if they do not comply. This again comes back to the variation in practice across the country. So I ask the Minister, her colleagues and the department to talk to some of those commissioners, to understand the historical and the live experience they have in dealing with some of the statutory guidance we have put into some of the legislation that has come through the House in the past three or four years, to see how effective it is and what we can learn from it.

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his contribution and reassure him that I was not just reading out a script. I have put a lot of thought into this. I have been in the place of delivering on this agenda, so I do have the experience.

We have to be careful that we are not too prescriptive at every level, because that can absolutely confound and take up more resource. But I do acknowledge that statutory guidance has to be adhered to, monitored and dealt with with the same seriousness across the piece and, where it has not been adhered to, it has to be called out. The most important thing that all of us can do is make sure that there is an awareness of the rights and responsibilities of the different organisations involved and that they live up to them and, as we have said all the way through, put the needs of some of the most vulnerable children in our communities at the heart of everything we do.